Originally Posted by
smartcooky
That Washington Post article looks like a load of Horse Cock to me. The writer has clearly never been to NZ, never interviewed any NZ politicians and knows nothing about NZ.
The writer actually trained and studied in New Zealand, the trouble is that he is so far leftwing that anything beyond the Greens looks like it's far right.
The main issue is Immigration. What the Author seems to fail to understand is that National's immigration policy was unsustainable. We were bringing 70,000 people a year into the country, the size of one of our medium cities! This is like adding a New Plymouth, Palmerston North, Nelson, Rotorua, or Whangarei to the country every singe year! We can't build fast enough, we can't create jobs fast enough, and our infrastructures, including things like schools and hospitals, can't handle it. Worse most of them are staying in Auckland causing massive issues with overpopulation and crowding. It's one of the main reasons that the average house price in Auckland hit a million dollars!
National wanted it because it helped to keep our "rockstar" GDP up, especially as the Christchurch rebuild starts to wind down, but the fact is that if we keep up that sort of immigration, the country is going to collapse on itself because we can't support that number of people arriving here every year, something had to give. NZ First and Labour recognise this and realise that we need to stop the flood gate that National opened and treat immigration sensibly so that we can make sure that those coming in can get houses and jobs, and so can New Zealanders who were born here! It's not about being Nationalistic or anti-immigrant, it's about making sure that the weight of people in the country doesn't sink us because we can't handle it, something that would make things worse for all of us.